


Faithless

by ChicChicBoom



Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Shadowhunter Chronicles - All Media Types
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Cherry Picking Our Canon, Hand Waving The Rest, M/M, Making It Up Whole Cloth, Parabatai
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:28:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26682946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChicChicBoom/pseuds/ChicChicBoom
Summary: Alec believes he can succeed in all that he does. Jace never learns to believe that he can. They will not discover that they are both wrong until it is oh, much too late.This is where it starts.
Relationships: Alec Lightwood/Jace Wayland
Comments: 28
Kudos: 18





	1. this is how it works

This is how it works.

They bring a wounded boy home.

Battered and bruised and blond as a corona on the outside, damaged and lost everywhere else and Alec learns for the first time what it means to have to be so careful not to break yet more out of ignorance. Square meals put round flesh on stoic bones but the fracture in the eyes never seems to lessen. So Alec learns, also for the first time, how to think of someone else first; before everything, before anything, because Isabelle can fly on her own thank you very much but this new thing under his hands has a frantic heartbeat he desperately needs to know how to calm.

He draws patience on his skin like a rune every morning; spends his afternoons teaching how to push and how to shove with laughter and words and the stagger of shoulders. Teaching his little blond bird bright boy that touch doesn’t always have to mean hurt, that competition can also mean fun. That aggression can also be play.

That teasing payback can be had, taken, given, traded, hoarded, and still and still and always Alec will be there.

He sinks his roots deep and then deeper yet to balance against the strain his new brother exerts, stronger with each year that passes. Jace grows and then grows beyond and Alec stretches to not be left behind. There is no such thing as perfection; mistakes like stigmata, misjudgements sketched onto walls in impact lines. Reaction and retaliation that breaks out where it cannot be seen, both calculated and helplessly visceral, and he learns again and again and _again_ how to bind together what desperately wants to break and be done with.

He scans always for the cracks even as the gaps narrow and Alec leans more and more into it, onto it, trusting his weight against the new ground he’s helping to build.

This is how it doesn’t work.

Jace never really learns to trust.

There are times when Alec understands this and forgives, even as there are times when he doesn’t and can’t. Whatever broke in Jace before he came to rest in Alec’s hands will never heal exactly right and it’s hard to remember when tempers flare and words flash like knives. When sharp edges do replace the words and there is red on worn floors, smeared like phrases onto the rough canvas and Alec stays within walls so Jace can escape them, cleans the mess before there are questions that have answers he wants no one else to know.

It becomes normal, it becomes expected — codified even, finally ritual. Jace cannot always sleep and Alec has no intention of letting his brother believe himself still lost. He learns more about how to fight and how to survive during these new sermons dispensed from a different, more vicious pulpit than all he inhales during the daylight hours. When the doctrines have rules and boundaries and oversight.

He is taught form and precision in the light; he discovers how little that can matter in the dark.

Jace came to them already burning and Alec teaches himself how to leech away the worst of it because ice can sear just as deep as fire. Perhaps even more so because ice numbs before it kills. Alec gains inches and time and resolve; applies a new way of patience. Taunts his restless whirlwind into incremental mistakes until there comes a time when Alec doesn’t always lose and Jace does not always win. The adults around them nod, pair them together more and more, thinking whatever adults think.

Alec doesn’t care and if Jace ever wonders, he never speaks it where Alec can hear. They laugh and they fight and they surge forward in lock step and they pass every test they are given, neck and neck and arm in arm. Back to back.

They grow like spears and are taught to believe they can swallow all pain, discard all that they are told is unessential because they are meant for a war that Alec at least has yet to see. They will be soldiers. Alec begins to dream of the time when they will make their first kills together because it is unthinkable that it be anything else. He dreams of Jace’s eyes and how they will burn in that apocalyptic moment. He dreams of how good it will be, must be, has to be.

He is a child still, in some ways. Still sheltered, still believing all he is told, still believing that he knows all he needs to know.

Alec believes he can succeed in all that he does. Jace never learns to believe that he can. They will not discover that they are both wrong until it is oh, much too late.


	2. this is where it starts

This is where it starts.

Alec has loved his brother all his life.

He never thinks about it. It is fact, as immutable as the world’s turning that brings the color of autumn leaves to them over and over again, the same color as the Angel’s grace that shifts in Jace’s eyes sometimes.

Alec no longer thinks about the time before when he had no brother. If asked, he would say that time does not exist, has never existed. They have always been together after all, Jace and Alec, Alec and Jace, heat and sweat and summer’s sun saturated on their skin and the snapping cold of winter’s anger in their veins and bandages saturated with apologies never spoken. The struggle forever to be first and best, never truly caring for the result.

Childhood finally breaks on the point of a blade. They stagger outside covered in gore and glory, spilling onto the street above in slashed leather and broken buckles that jangle painfully. The shake of adrenalin streaks their fingers to near uselessness, riding ecstatic counterpoint against the painful burn of the heritage that will forever hijack their skins.

Jace crows his laughter to the newborn skies. His blond, beloved hair is matted with the unnameable, streaked down into so much dirt and Alec’s arm is slung leaden and spasming over his brother’s shoulders. Never before has he used so much, so fast, imbuing his weapons with light and fire in brilliant cascades.

He hides his face for the excess of feeling. Presses his cheek, dares even his mouth to the hidden shadows of Jace’s neck to breathe salt, breathe triumph, the sweet smell of _alive alive alive_ as he huffs his joy into his brother’s flesh. He is clumsy in his attentions, innocent still somehow of all that will come later. Happy simply that they are together in this, as in everything.

Jace laughs yet again, his voice ringing like clarion bells against the indifferent mortal world surrounding them and for Alec there is no better day. No better way to be.

They were born for this. He has dreamed of this. Alec has never once doubted.

And the adults continue to nod and continue to think all they wish to and Alec proudly writes their first report, scrupulous in his detail, meticulous in his record of where and when and how. He signs it solemnly. Jace just looks over his shoulder, hair damp then from a much needed shower with all his colors returned, the new bruises a batik of strutting honor and signs himself over with an illegible flourish.

When Alec dreams now, he dreams not of possibility, but of the truths written into their days. The clean thrust of Jace’s arm next to his, skin brushing skin as evil dies around them, beside them, damned near under them in sparks of thwarted rage because nothing crosses the circles Jace dances. The righteous fire of the old language carves mandalas into Alec’s bones as he shoots again and again, _precision_ and _strength_ and _courage_ his now for the taking to protect the only thing that Alec loves with all that he is.

They cannot be touched. They cannot lose. They are fifteen, they are sixteen, they stand straight and tall and unconcerned by the darkness they wade through.

Standing in the frothing waters they have understood only as birthright, they do not see the flood as it starts to rise around them.


	3. this is how it starts

This is how it starts.

Alec begins to dream of other things.

It is gradual, insidious. He wakes now twisted in sheets that seem to mirror the unwanted twist of his heart. Even his body seems no longer his; hot and shifting, often trembling on the edge of something he cannot see, cannot pull away from. His very bones ache with it.

He cannot want these things. He cannot desire these things. When he forces himself gasping awake, he digs his fingers hard into the coolness of his bed and tells himself fiercely, over and over again, that these are dreams only. This is not reality. This is not _true_.

His mouth starts to taste of kisses he refuses to remember.

He catches himself touching Jace more. They have always been physical because that was Alec’s first lesson to teach, how to anchor his changeling brother to the ground with hands and body and struggle. But now his fingers linger more than they should, dig in harder, tight with the alienness of this new and terrible urge to grab and pin and do something, although he isn’t sure what that something is or if he would know it even if he saw it.

Jace’s hair plastered against the back of his neck. The fast smile that exposes one sharp tooth. The furnace heat when he is close.

Alec discovers a shame he has no name for. He yanks his hands back now when they start to reach, stands so much farther away, paranoid that what he dreams will be seen on his face if anyone looks close enough. He has always been quiet, reserved, contained tight within himself but now he turns sullen, snapping at everyone and everything.

He buries himself in his studies, the books and the laws and the strictures that Jace has no patience for and stays far away from. It earns his mother’s faint, cool approval which is something at least to hold to, fragile as it feels.

And still the dreams tangle around his legs at night, holding him down. He wakes up shaking, chasing a feeling that threatens to break like tsunami. A belly full of gold and honey and snakes that he cannot seem to get rid of and his hands spasm on nothing in the darkness, holding a ghost of a body he knows better than he knows his own.

He avoids his brother for weeks.

It can not last, of course.

It is the dead of night and he hits the floor before he is even aware that he’s been invaded, overrun. There is an instant of shock, palms flat to the cold floor before an implacable grip yanks his arm nearly out of socket. He scrambles to his feet before he can be dragged.

He already knows. He’s still blinking the surreality from his eyes as he’s pulled through the doorway but he doesn’t fight back.

A lingering trace of ice still hangs in the air, sizzling with the force of the _unlock_. He should have known better than to even try.

Jace is a sketched shape in front of him, dressed in his fighting leathers and smelling of tar and smoke and something astringently sharp, scents of the mortal world, of the hunt. His grip doesn’t loosen even though Alec offers, continues to offer no resistance.

His brother hasn’t needed to roam the witch’s hour since they started exorcising his inner demons with the flesh of the outer ones, but in this moment Alec is trapped between a sense-memory of then and now; near running after his brother’s implacable back, chasing what he cannot seem to catch, woefully underdressed and inadequately prepared.

Like the twelve he used to be, he isn't sure what’s going on and cannot bear to ask. Unlike the twelve he used to be, his bare feet make absolutely no sound as they both slide though the shadows they are named for. Whatever this is, it is apparent that they are not supposed to be caught at it.

Jace smells like a fight. Alec licks his lips in both dread and anticipation.

He is not wrong. Jace pulls them outside through the wards as if they don’t matter at all, into the black and wet and cold and away from the cameras that would take official notice and would give official reprimands. It is only when they are hidden far enough away under the cover of half wild trees and the light polluted skies that Jace finally lets go.

He knew it was coming. He is still not ready.

He stumbles back gracelessly from the hard shove and his surprised back impacts solid bark. The breath jangles in his throat, half punched out.

He cannot help himself, cannot seem to help anything anymore. He braces, hunching a little as if to make himself smaller, a hand already reaching to touch the center of his chest where Jace did.

He can’t read his brother’s expression in the darkness, isn’t sure he wants to even if he could. He can already feel the bruises on his bicep forming from Jace’s impatience with him.

Jace makes a sound of what might be frustration. He steps into Alec’s space as his hands curve up, reaching to do what Alec knows not; grab him, shake him, hit him. Demand explanations, probably. Yell at him.

The paralysis of decision that led him here shatters.

He cannot be touched like this, not now. Not here, where there is no one to see, no one to judge, no one to _know_. Not with the cold night air on his bare chest and the painful scratch hard against his spine, his naked toes curled into prickle and loam and Jace dressed so rough and black and beautiful and everything Alec cannot separate himself from.

Alec is no more human than Jace is, if no less. He doesn’t mean to but the need to get away translates into _blur_ , a shift of reality to cover the space he must have in order to be able to breathe again.

He knows his mistake even as he makes it. He’s fifteen feet away before he can force himself to stop, more damning than any words could possibly be.

He has never rejected Jace before. He’s never wanted to. His thigh burns with _swiftness_ , unlocked and gently glowing in its betrayal.

He makes himself turn back because what he most wants to do is keep running.

Jace has a hand raised as if Alec is still close enough to touch. His eyes are wide enough to show a surprised white.

They narrow. Jace lowers his hand and Alec swallows, once and painfully. He tries to think of an excuse, something to say, anything that might help but the only words that come to him are slick with a poison he will not spill. _Don’t touch me_ will lead to _why the fuck not_ which will lead… Alec doesn’t know where it will lead but is absolutely sure with everything that he is that it will be nowhere he wants to go.

Jace rolls his shoulders, an odd adjustment. Rubs a hand across his mouth.

Sunlight shimmers across his throat like a necklace. Alec has only that much warning, then he’s all but impossible to see. Black and gold, a panther rush and so fast that Jace is already past, so close that Alec feels the flare, the brush of a sleeve across his chest hard enough that bone might have shattered had it connected.

But Alec is not human. And they’ve fought before.

Alec remembers again what he should never have forgotten and it feels like absolution.

Because they’ve fought before, yes, even fought just like this before, where Alec isn’t sure if Jace really intends to hurt him, isn’t sure if Jace himself even knows how far he means to go. Whatever his brother took away with him from the years he never talks about, this is the deepest part of it; the switch of thought, the twitch in the mind that calls lightning down from clear blue skies and the only way out is through.

They shift and move and shift again, frenzied flashes in the air. Jace is relentless. Alec’s fear and panic have no room to live, start to die in white streamers as flesh begins to steam, transmuting into something better, something brighter. He reaches deeper and deeper, calling his Marks faster and faster to trigger and burn, calling yet more to the surface as they fail under the assault.

He will not strike his brother back. A war of attrition then between how long Jace can stay angry. How long Alec can withstand before he burns himself out.

Somewhere in the blackened eye of it, Alec starts to smile. Evades yet another rush, whirling to push, spinning Jace away to skid a gruesome furrow into the ground. Alec is dangerously uncovered, a near death sentence at any other time against hellspawn with too many legs, too many teeth and too much armor but here it is an advantage. He has hands, to take advantage of the straps that would hold Jace’s weapons, both leverage and torque in one. A heavy collar he can grab, fabric he can twist.

His mind is wiped clean and he suddenly never wants to be anywhere else. Because he never moves as fast as when he is with Jace. He never fights as hard as he does when he’s with Jace. He never wants to stop when he’s with Jace.

The exquisite slide of bunching muscle under littered scars shared between two bodies because whatever burns in Jace, the answer is always, always inside Alec.

Finally _swiftness_ flickers and dies another death and Alec is caught before he can call it forward again. Fingertips dig brutally hard into the bones of his wrist and a hand wrenches at his shoulder as both of them fall back into the mortal world, shocked still and bracing hard against each other. Alec catches the momentum like a freight train and his muscles cord to prevent the teetering spin that would have slammed him to the ground.

They are so stupidly, closely matched. Jace cannot complete the throw. Alec cannot dislodge the grip. His arm creaks with strain and distortion.

And Alec laughs like the child he no longer is for the sheer wonder of it.

Jace grins, teeth wolf white in the flicker of moonlight.

There is a hand on the back of Alec’s neck suddenly without intervening motion, a stutter of the film loop. An arm curved hard around his waist. He’s pulled in, locked tight as his brother slides them together as easily as dancing, chest to chest, hip to hip. Heart to heart.

Alec inhales air like light even as he tries to jerk his head back and can’t. Tries to shove away and _can’t_.

The furnace of his brother curls against the full line of his body. Destructive and so nearly perfect with the taste of blood on his tongue, once and again, just like always, sticking everywhere they touch. The shiver of the blond bright hair so near to Alec’s mouth, which is just another way to say home.

Jace is so warm and they are together and this? This could never feel wrong. 

Alec could turn his head and his lips would brush Jace’s cheek.

Alec breathes and he breathes again and his hands tremble over his brother’s waist before they settle as lightly as he can make them. A ghost of a touch for all that Jace is clutching him as if he is dying. As if they are dying. There is a tremble in his brother’s body, barely felt, some unknown thing singing down his bones that translates to a prickle over Alec’s skin.

The world does not explode. 

Alec does not explode with his breath heavy and laboured. Darkness continues to hide all that they do and Alec flexes his fingers over and over again, Jace’s shirt bunching in his hands under his jacket. Jace does not shift away. Leans in that much more. They would cast a single shadow if there was one to be made.

When Alec finally drops his head to his brother’s shoulder, whatever is wound so tight in Jace softens. Alec feels the shift.

 _Parabatai_ , Jace whispers then out of nowhere. It’s barely a sound at all over the sweat-slick of Alec’s shoulder, pressed like a flower to the skin of his neck. _You can feel it. Alec, please tell me you can feel it too._

Alec would jerk back but his brother tightens the cage of his arms. A buckle somewhere digs into Alec’s ribs, crushing hard, and still Jace does not let go. Presses his cheek hard to his, as if contact alone can make the word true without any ceremony at all. For all Alec knows, the desire for it is enough.

Whatever he dreams of, that word is not one he ever thought would be spoken aloud. Not by him, for Alec can barely acknowledge the edges of what Jace means to him. Certainly not by Jace who could choose anyone at all to mirror his soul against. Who absolutely needs to choose someone else.

Because oh, he does feel it too, racing through his heart as if he and Jace are already in time with each other, breathing as one in the aftermath, and now the fingers are in his hair, gripping painfully as if Alec cannot be trusted to give the right answer if he steps back, looks at Jace, into Jace.

Alec realizes he’s gripping Jace’s waist in both hands hard enough that he’s going to leave bruises. His nose is buried in Jace’s hair.

All that they are, everything they could be. All that they will never be.

 _Don’t leave me alone, Alec. You feel it, don’t you?_ Jace whispers again and the words buzz into the bone behind his ear, a near kiss. A Mark where no one will ever see. _Alec, please. You know we’re meant to be together._

Alec inhales, stutteringly deep. Swallows copper, swallows blood.

Parabatai. Heart-twin, soul-brother. It is enough.

Alec will make it be enough.


	4. this is how it starts again

This is how it starts again.

They are eighteen, they are twenty, and Alec looks at his face in the bathroom mirror as morning struggles to rise from bed, and wonders just when _Alec_ became so much less important than _Lightwood_. There does not seem to be a point of demarcation. No moment he can point to, saying it was this, here, just then when the fault line shifted under his heels.

His runes are still as black and dangerous as the moment that Jace branded him for the side of war and for all that, he cannot remember when he last stepped outside the walls. It has been three days, four, five, a baker’s dozen since he last saw his parabatai, twice that again and more since they spoke beyond a press of hand to shoulder in passing, a greeting, a singular smile across the operations floor before Alec is once again required to turn away; the family he must now answer to, answer for at his shoulder, attached to a slick clipboard needing yet more of his attention.

He feels now, as never before, his mother’s collar around his throat. A once ghost that now chokes tight over the _deflect_ that was meant to guide harm away from a place where he is vulnerable.

Apparently it does not work against family. His father’s indifference is frost against his eyelashes, weighing them down even as his long fingers grip cold white porcelain.

Alec stares down into the drain that is named _future_. He flexes his hands and sees nothing. Feels nothing. _Does_ nothing. What is there, after all, to be done?

He will succeed because if this is what is required, he will be worthy of it. But this is the moment, standing alone on a square of cold floor when Alec belatedly wonders what he is giving up to earn it. When he might be permitted to breathe on his own again.

Who is to say how things fall out. Alec recedes with the tide, Lightwood is sanded and polished and made to serve in his stead. The son of Maryse, although he still has yet to grasp all the cruelty that will come to mean, understanding only that there is lack somewhere and that he alone must make up the difference. He cannot bear for his sister to have her sharp wit crushed against the grinding stones he holds back. He will never permit Jace to be chained down within walls, his furious wings clipped.

Alec stands alone as this morning’s sun strikes a halo in his hair and sinks his roots down and down, tells himself to stand fast. He sees what comes for him, tells himself once more that it is an honor. A landslide he braces for. A certain, crushing expectation he will manage as he always does.

His mirror does not seem inclined to offer advice on how.

\--

The Clave sends envoys, as they do, and Alec greets them as he must. This time they will be some months, learning what they can of new ways to fight ancient enemies. To carry away what they find merit in, offered in tidbits of sweet for consideration to those who do not wish to dirty their hands in their bright, beautiful city. The revised strategies are Alec’s but Maryse nods her head when she is offered backhanded compliments on the ops floor.

Alec turns his head away. It is Lightwood that is important, not him. It is imperative only that they win, not in the who and the how.

Yet this time within these new faces and bodies and names, there arrives a man with a tight cap of riotous curls and sharp eyes who looks to Alec. Who looks only to Alec. He stands in the second rank and stares unabashedly at the rune emblazoned on Alec’s throat with a twitch of his lips that even on first meeting skirts the edge of unacceptable familiarity.

Alec discovers to his terror that he is not the only one to have his particular flaw. He wants to hide. He wants to stand exactly where he is.

When he is invited to cross blades on the training floor, he cannot say no, isn’t sure he would even if an excuse could be found. He takes off his shirt and spins the satin worn staff in his hands, displays himself because he was asked to. Because with all the polite formality of the request, he knows at least this much.

He’s never felt himself looked at like this before. He has never felt himself admired before, in this way that speaks to something vibrating so close to his hidden heart, buried so deep inside.

It is clean sweat and a fine new necklace of pretty contusions and warm words of praise that come with hands that stroke along his shoulders a little too softly as they check for damage, a grip on the back of his neck that lingers a touch too long to be new friendship.

Jace watches it all from the sidelines, his black-clad forearms draped and dangling over the railing, saying absolutely nothing at all and Alec feels shipwrecked on the floor, being touched like this where anyone can see.

Nothing, of course, happens. The Law forbids so many things and wrong is _wrong_ but when the Clave eventually recalls its warriors, Alec is left with the memory in the antechamber afterwards. Crowded, herded into a barely concealed corner, an insistent hand once more on his neck to guide him forward and then a cool wall hard against his palms.

Hot breath drags itself behind his ear. A caution of calloused fingers digs into his hip, too tight to be any kind of acceptable with a confident weight pressed so close, as great as his own. Alec is not sure if it is meant to be threat or promise and he burns for the possibilities of both.

When the mouth scrapes down his shoulder, tasting, he makes a surprised sound, shockingly low. Alec shudders before he can think to control it and his answer is a deep murmur of encouragement, assurance even and Alec arches into it without thought.

A hand strokes, spreads its fingers wide over his stomach. A foot steps between his, nudges his stance a little wider.

Then there is a slide of smiling lips along the side of his throat, not enough to call a kiss, too much to be called anything else and he both wants and doesn’t want this. His empty hand flexes into a fist as he drops his forehead against the wall.

Alec closes his eyes.

It's not Jace. It will never be Jace. But heat and strength press closer yet because passive acceptance is still acceptance, is it not? Pins him spread and still against the cool wall even as relentless fingers sink into his hair, start to drag his head back. Alec has no idea what he wants, what he wants to _do_ , but this feeling? Oh, this hot, trembling knife of a feeling.

The teeth are on his neck, already starting to bite.

An interruption of sound breaks them apart.

There is a flicker of heart-seizing bronze in the corner of his eye. A shift of black, a banging door. The hands keeping him prisoner jolt away and it is enough to shatter the spell, break the lock of his body.

Alec shoves his way out in a panic, not daring to look back.

He’s breathing too hard, he knows he is. He’s halfway to the ops center before he comes back to himself, his long stride eating up the distance between what almost was and what could have been.

His skin shivers with aborted reaction. His hands prickle and clench. Who saw them? If they saw anything at all, hidden as they’d been. No one looks at him as he walks, as he pretends he has a purpose, a place to go but Alec cannot relax.

There is a ball of cinder in his gut, ignited and smoking and he rubs the back of his hand hard over his mouth. Brushes the back of his neck with his fingers for a touch that is already only memory.

He wants to do it again. Have it done. Take the kiss he knows was waiting for him with his head tipping back. Give one. Angel forfend, to have had the courage to turn around and touch _back_.

He must be stronger than this. What he is is not permitted and he has to remember that, no matter the provocation, no matter the temptation. _Dura lex, sed lex_. He repeats the phrase to himself over and over again as if it will make a difference. He will be _stronger_.

The opportunity does not come again, Alec makes sure of it, yet the damage, such as it is, is done. If nothing else, at least Alec knows now what it is to want and be wanted back.

Jace stalks the halls, a wildfire burning for days.

Alec never asks and so he never knows what Jace never speaks of.


	5. this is how it ends

This is how it ends.

Alec is twenty three and the world is falling apart.

His fury whirls to the sky, a banshee’s shriek shredding all in its path. A dagger to his brother’s throat, all his weight thrown forward and bearing down. It would take nothing at all to finish this.

He has never felt this before. He has no idea how to stop.

Jace lifts his chin, something between snarl and dare and defiance with his hands spread open and wide on the ground and it would take so very _little_ and Alec’s mind is so terribly empty.

Heart-shot. Stripped nearly beyond recognition. The chain around his throat named family is something he has learned to breathe past, breathe through, but Jace’s leash on him is razor wire and for the first time Jace has put his hand to it; wrapped his fingers, wrist, _arm_ around it and pulled Alec apart.

Is this what he wanted? Alec on his knees, begging? He has one already digging implacably into Jace’s chest, every move his brother tries to make earns him another shove of gravity. Alec can feel ribs bending. He’s going to crack Jace open if he doesn’t relent.

Thy people are my people. Thy god is my god. But everything always and forever yoked in service to what _Jace_ wants, what _Jace_ needs. As if what Alec has wanted and has needed for all these years is just so much less.

This cannot be real and is.

Jace’s eyes are the only thing left. They do not bleed gold as they’ve done before, cleanly mundane for some inexplicable reason here at the end of things, staring fiercely into his own from so short a distance away. Alec is aware dimly of his own growling, panting breath, staggeringly loud.

There are words and they make no sense. They plead not for forgiveness but for, of all things, escape. _Come away_ , Jace says, as if the blazing edge pinning him to the ground means nothing, a drift of smoke instead of his death made solid. _Come with me, Alec. We need to be together._

As if Alec has not protected his brother his entire life. As if Alec has not permitted this foolish idiocy over and over and _over_ again for love of Jace, scouring the blood both literal and figurative from the footprints as his brother walks farther and farther apart, farther and farther away.

As if he has not kept him safe, his sister sheltered, their places next to him warded and shielded with everything he has.

As if he has not tied his very soul to the man now sprawled and arrogant underneath him.

Alec would scream if it would make any difference. His teeth are bared, his arm shakes and there is no control. Can they not _see?_ It’s all falling apart and still and _still_ Jace defends what he has done. The lunacy of defiance, Laws millenia old that do not care who or what they crush.

How can he not see what they have done? The full weight of the Clave gathers, is gathering, looking to break its youngest sons for their sins and still Jace looks only to Clary, caring absolutely nothing for the wreckage they are leaving in their wake. Wreckage that will bury Alec’s family. Wreckage that will bury _Alec_.

There is nothing that will save this now. The Gate to the City stands open but the prisoner stolen, the one sacrifice that might have kept the executioner’s axe from falling a little longer. In the center of the maelstrom that is all that is left of his choices, he wonders if they will accept him instead.

Would it be enough? Lightwood cannot be saved but Alec may still have value enough to buy Isabelle time to get clear. Will they tear his body apart first, or his mind for all the secrets he has been asked to keep? Sew his eyes shut, stitch his mouth closed afterwards. _Quiet_ carved between his eyebrows and what would Jace say _then_?

Alec wrenches himself away because what he feels is despair made thick enough to choke on. Staggers to his feet only to see the line of blood on his dagger, _his brother’s blood_ , and he hurls it away with a cry that is nothing close to human.

The blade decays without his will to drive it, the hilt skittering into darkness.

Alec backs away, digs his fingers into his hair and tries to think.

If the answer is that if it is his brother that must now be brought back in chains to answer for what he has done, offered up in place of the lost duine sídhe to appease the Clave, the truth is that even now — even with all that Jace has done, all that Jace has done to him — he cannot do it.

Jace is crying. Does he even know? _Come_ , he says again, rough and desperate, half sitting up. The need in his voice flays Alec open again and he bleeds a little more. _Parabatai. Parabatai,_ please. _The Clave is_ wrong. _Come with us, we’ll make it right_.

Alec’s fingers dig into his chest then, covering his heart so that it cannot follow.

He has gone as far as he can. He will go no farther. The only _us_ he ever believed in is breaking apart in front of his eyes. Go? Leave everything behind. Abandon all that he has worked so hard for, denied himself for, traitor to everything and everyone and all for Jace so that he can stand and watch Jace believe in someone _else_?

The mark on his hip is incandescent with warning, flaring phosphorus to the bone.

He has the incoherent urge to grab his stele, impale the mark that binds him to his brother. Gouge it out of his body somehow, ruin it, deface it, make it so it never happened. So that this _life_ would not have happened. So he would not have to stand here and know that he was never going to be good enough for anyone, never trusted enough, never important enough, never _wanted_ enough, all that he gives and it’s never… it’s never...

Parabatai, Jace had said that first time, branding love into the space behind Alec’s ear in that darkness. Their heartbeats overlapping, so close against his brother that Alec could close his eyes even now and feel it all again.

It was supposed to mean something. Perhaps it had only been desperation.

It must come through the bond surging sick between them because Jace scrambles to his knees, to his feet, lurches towards Alec as if he thinks there is something still to be done. His eyes are so wide, his hands and fingers already reaching forward as if to call something back.

So long ago that the books it is written in are brown and brittle, touched only by the holiest of hands, the Angel Raziel spilled his willing blood to create men Marked for a war that could not be fought otherwise. A millenia later, Alec’s blood still carries that golden fire just as his brother’s does; that liquid, blazing glow that moves under Jace’s skin sometimes, that sparks like metal in his eyes.

Alec has never been so graced before.

But he has also never felt like this before.

It takes nothing at all to pull back his arm in a motion he has practiced all his life as an arrow coalesces out of void, nocked to a bow that creates itself in his hand in filigrees of curling, flowering, deadly light.

At the limits of angelic hearing, he finally hears booted feet running.

He looks then to the boiling gray sky. Pulls back and watches his arrow fly to a Heaven he is never going to see, a beacon bright enough to be seen for miles even in this fractured place. Here, it says. I am here. Another blazing shaft flares because he wills it so and he spins it in his fingers as if it were mortal wood and steel.

He looks back to Jace who has frozen with an expression that Alec isn’t sure how to read. Panic, maybe. Disbelief. Pain. His brother's hand digs protectively over the rune at his side that fluctuates in agonizing time to Alec’s, light oozing through the cloth, dripping through his fingers.

 _Run_ , Alec says finally. _Someone is going to die here. I don’t want it to be you_.

Will he fight the Clave when they arrive, too late to do anything and all the more angry for it? He could. Buy Jace more time to get back to Clary, to do whatever it is they seem to think must be done. He can keep them here for long enough, however many there are, because even without Jace he is still who he was born to be. And that person has slaughtered his way across battlefields for less reason than this.

If he dies, it’s not like he will have to worry about what they will do to him after. If he lives, it's not as if he will care.

Perhaps he will just stand here, his hands full of useless light and his mind full of a grief so paralyzing it already eats at the ground he stands on. Perhaps that will be enough to keep the Clave’s dogs here, sniffing at him. It doesn’t happen every day, after all, that a parabatai bond weeps light like blood.

Alec has tried all his life. Tried over and over and over again. Believed in himself, in the Law, but most of all in Jace; all his faith in his brother and who they are together. And it has made no difference because it seems Jace never believed back. Would rather believe in someone else. Something else. Anything else.

 _Run_ , he says again. _They’re almost here_. His grip spasms around the smooth shaft in his hand. His skin smokes but it's no worse than a fresh rune, a pain both familiar and welcome.

 _Please, Alec_ , Jace says. His eyes are as bright as mirrors. _Please_. _Don’t_ do _this. Together, remember? You can't leave me._

He nocks the arrow and watches the light splinter in his brother’s eyes.

He doesn’t even need to say it.

With a howl that shatters the air around them, Jace turns and runs.


End file.
